Is It Possible For A Democrat to Go Too Far?

One would think that Democratic Congressman Pete Stark went too far when he accused President Bush, on the House floor, of “just lik[ing] to blow things up,” and of getting soldiers killed in Iraq for his own “amusement.” Stark continued:

“What are you going to do for that 200 or 300 billion bucks, folks, that you’re spending to kill these kids when they grow up? You can’t answer that, can you? You look at your shoes, look up here, you don’t know,” he said.
“So you don’t even want to talk about 200 or 300 billion bucks to kill innocent Iraqis and young men and women. There is no member of this House that has an enlisted child over there. There is no risk for you guys.”

This last claim is false, unless Stark is playing games with the meaningless phrase “enlisted child”; to take just one example, the son of my own Congressman, John Kline, has flown helicopters in Iraq. And the al Qaeda members and other terrorists, many of them not Iraqis, who are being killed and captured by our forces in Iraq are hardly “innocent.” But facts have never been important when it comes to left-wing rants on the House floor.
Stark’s tirade was insane, but for some time, not a single Democrat tried to distance himself or herself from it, while Stark was wildly applauded on the left (and equally crazed) side of the blogosphere.
This episode seemed to test the proposition that there is literally nothing that the leaders of the Democratic Party cannot stomach, but Nancy Pelosi finally stepped in with some mild criticism:

“While members of Congress are passionate about their views, what Congressman Stark said during the debate was inappropriate and distracted from the seriousness of the subject at hand – providing health care for America’s children,” Pelosi, D-San Francisco said.

Or, one might add, America’s adults; the vast majority of SCHIP recipients here in Minnesota, and in a number of other states, are adults, not children.
Still, if you look at the overall reaction from Democrats, such as the quote from Congresswoman Barbara Lee in the linked San Francisco Chronicle article, it appears that Stark’s descent into lunacy was a welcome complement to the Democrats’ political strategy.
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